Another Good Dog Beach To Visit

I apologize that images are blurry from importing from another blog site, but the info is still good.

One of the few dog beaches that we hadn’t hit yet, was Davis Islands Dog Beach. It’s located in Tampa, FL, right near TGH (Tampa General Hospital). A couple of nights ago, the family, dogs and a couple of the boys friends “ran” over there for a swim.

OK. We’re blind. We passed it up. When we saw a guard by the yacht club, we asked if it was located by the port-a-potty we had just passed. Affirmative. So we turned around and parked by the boat ramp with all the pretty boats in our line of vision. Now, having looked up pictures of the beach on the internet in the past, I wasn’t feeling too positive that that we were in the right place. We should have been facing an industrial area instead of pretty boats.

As my husband was setting up the first umbrella, I headed across the street to the port-a-potty. Don’t knock it! At least it’s some where to go. And it’s one of the nicer one’s – one that’s for handicapped individuals. It’s got a concrete floor and is nice and large. When I emerge, I check out the fenced in dog park that’s right behind it. I looked to the right of it for a beach. I see workmen on the left and yell out to them, “Do you know where the dog beach is?” They point behind them. It wasn’t where we were setting up. It was across the road from it. I head back to the group and we re-pack and move to the correct location.

The only real thing this beach has going against it is the scenery. But it was still pretty cool. It’s located right in the Port lane where cruise ships pass through! While we were packing up across the street, we saw a Carnival Cruise ship passrightby!! Look at this next picture. See the red ship? The Carnival ship passed right between that and the beach!

How cool is that?! It would have been really neat if I could have gotten a shot of it passing by as we were swimming right near it. Speaking of swimming, I noticed that we were the only people in the water. And when I just looked on-line for the park information, I noticed that there were no people in the water in them either. What’s that about? People swim at other dog beaches. Oh well. We had fun!

It’s got a few palm trees for shade. A couple of picnic tables. Drinking fountains for humans and K-9. A hose to rinse off. The one feature that this park has that I haven’t seen at any other dog beaches so far, is it’s fenced in. That’s a nice feature. You don’t have to worry about our dog running off. Now, swimming off – that’s another matter, but you get that at any beach. And I’ve never heard any stories about dogs that make a swim for it! lol

If you plan to go into the water, swim shoes aren’t a bad idea. A friend suggested we keep to the left, away from the dog wash station. At high tide, there are rocks hidden under the water that the dogs can cut their paws on. We were well away from there, but because we (people) can touch the ground a lot further out, a few in our party got little cuts.

Here are some lucky doggies having fun:

Another neat/strange thing about this place – it’s RIGHT next to a small airport – the runway is almost right next to the fence. AND it’s right near MacDill Air Force Base, so there were some cool planes flying right over us:

Some fun shots…

As we were leaving the beach, this is what we saw…

If I took pictures of your dogs, please contact me by clicking on my website link (upper right) and going to Info, then Contact. I’ll email you the rest of them.